Bruce La Bruce

Bruce LaBruce was a Canadian filmmaker who was known for employing conventional storytelling narratives into his sexually explicit films, many of which were of an avant-garde nature. The Ontario-born LaBruce (who is cagey about his real name, having claimed at different times that it was either Justin Stewart or Bryan Bruce) developed a fascination with filmmaking came in the 1980s when he happened upon a Super 8 movie camera. Over the course of the decade, LaBruce wrote and directed several experimental short films, including 1987's "Boy, Girl." By the early 90s, LaBruce transitioned into features, with adult-oriented films like "Slam!" (1992), "Super 8 ½" (1994), and "Hustler White" (1996) quickly establishing his style blending conventional storytelling techniques with overtly sexual subject matter. During this period, LaBruce also began writing and contributing photos to Vice magazine, as well as Nerve and The Guardian. Filmmaking, however, was his true calling, and by the early 2010s LaBruce had already wrote and directed over a dozen films. He ran into a bit of controversy in 2010 after his film "L.A. Zombie" was deemed inappropriate by censors and subsequently banned from screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Undeterred, LaBruce continued to promote the film, which did receive its world premiere at New Zealand's OutTakes Film Festival. Already known as a leading experimental filmmaker in his native Canada, LaBruce abandoned some of the more taboo subject matter of his previous work with the more accessible "Gerontophilia" (2013). "Gerontophilia" was screened at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, and went on to win Best Feature at the Montreal Festival of New Cinema. The follow-up "Pierrot Lunaire" (2014) was a film adaptation of LaBruce's staging of Arnold Schoenberg's modernist song cycle, which premiered in Berlin in 2011.